17 years after 9/11, the mourning continues: Elizabeth Sullivan

Posted Sep 11, 2018

People attending the dedication stand around the 93-foot tall Tower of Voices on Sunday at the Flight 93 National Memorial in Shanksville, Pa. The tower contains 40 wind chimes representing the 40 people who perished in the crash of Flight 93 in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. (Keith Srakocic, AP Photo/Pool)

CLEVELAND -- This day, September 11, still feels heavy with grief. Not just for our thousands of countrymen and women who died on that day of terrorist attack, and for their families, their communities, and for our national psyche, our sense of basic safety pierced so dramatically on that day, but also for the many thousands of U.S. service members who've given their lives or limbs or suffered psychological damage in the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and other conflict zones that followed. And that doesn't even include the hundreds of foreign nationals who died on 9/11 and since, fighting side-by-side with Americans in Afghanistan, or the tens of thousands of noncombatants killed in these conflicts.

When I started writing this column this morning they were only up to the "B's" in reading the list of those who perished at the World Trade Center in New York City.

I remember the poisonous dust clouds and acrid smoke still swirling above lower Manhattan, when The Plain Dealer sent me to New York soon after 9/11, and, on subsequent visits, seeing the terrible gash in the ground, the poignant homemade memorials nearby to the firefighters who fell so gallantly trying to save others. Now a museum and monument built deep into the ground memorializes that site. It is somber, sobering, bleak, yet somehow uplifting. New York City and all of us have rebuilt and moved on.

But it is the new monument of sounds reaching to the heavens, the "Tower of Voices" just dedicated this weekend in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, that speaks to me most personally. It was the passengers on this aircraft who were the ones to take control of their fates, their "let's roll" echoing from cellphones aboard the aircraft around the nation. Ultimately their actions saved the U.S. Capitol or maybe the White House from a potentially devastating attack from the air.

As the superintendent of the Flight 93 National Memorial at Shanksville said this morning, in a 9/11 memorial involving both President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump, those "voices" reflect the voices of those 40 passengers as they sacrificed themselves so bravely to do what they could do to save themselves and others, and what was right to do.

What happened aboard United Airlines Flight 93 can only be surmised, but it seems pretty clear that the four hijackers, unable to subdue a planeload of 40 determined passengers, chose instead to obliterate all of them in a cornfield in Pennsylvania.

Flight 93, en route from Newark, New Jersey, to San Francisco, was hijacked 46 minutes into the flight, within Cleveland air space -- a portion of the pilot's distress call apparently heard by an air traffic controller at the Cleveland Air Traffic Control Center in Oberlin but he or she didn't understand its import and it wasn't repeated. Still within Cleveland air space, the hijackers diverted the plane back toward Washington, D.C.

In those days, I lived beneath the path of west and southbound aircraft flying out of Cleveland Hopkins International Airport, and a favorite evening walk with my dog after my young son's bedtime was in the meadows behind our house looking up at the blanket of stars, hearing the occasional roar of aircraft in the skies, or freight trains beyond the woods, among many reminders of how connected we all were with one another. And the silence from the skies that followed 9/11 was a stark reminder that that terrorist attack had upended that togetherness and connectedness in ways that have been hard to reassemble, even after the planes started flying again.

The Tower of Voices, an apt memorial to the passengers of United Flight 93, reminds us that unity and connectedness and the individual acts of bravery and sacrifice that arise from them remain of enduring value in our fractured world.

Elizabeth Sullivan is the director of opinion for cleveland.com and directs the editorial board for The Plain Dealer and cleveland.com.

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